Friday, 27 December 2013

The fabulous, glittery Poetry Divas will be taking some time out from their festivities in the bosom of their friends and families to take part in Dublin Genius on Monday 30th December.

Dublin Genius, A Day of Ideas, will celebrate some of Dubliners’ best known talents: literature, comedy, and non-stop talking!

There's loads going on so if you need to shake the cobwebs out, come into Dublin. And what's more, it's free!

The Little Museum
will be hosting a History Ireland Hedge School, which will cover the
breadth of Ireland’s literary history. Taking in Joyce, Stoker and Roddy
Doyle, some very special guests will be on hand to underline why Dublin
has historically been such a city of words. Writers carrying that torch
into the 21st century, such as Dermot Bolger, will be reading their works and starting conversations in Smock Alley Theatre (the city’s oldest theatre).

Nearby in Dublin’s Twisted Pepper,
the irreverent political cabaret that is Leviathan will be examining
the role Ireland’s great writers have played in the political life of
the country in its usual enlightening manner, while the Irish poetic
tradition gets the slam poetry treatment in a swathe of pubs across the
town.

A packed programme of cultural events, from poetry slams and literary
readings to science exhibitions and comedy, kicking off at 2pm and
running til late. Dublin Genius is an opportunity to experience the
“cultural capital” of our capital. It organised by the lovely lads that bring us Mindfield at Electric Picnic, Leviathan.

Saturday, 21 December 2013

This is a Story invites entries of all original unpublished work of up to 500 words andthe cost is €5 per entry (3 entries for €10). There is no theme or subject limitations and entries willbe
judged anonymously by author Mike Mc Cormack. You can enter by post, by
e-mail or by Facebook and the deadline is January 14th 2014. Prize:
€300.

Send entries to GRCC, "The Lodge" Forster Court, Galway with cheques/postal orders made out to Galway Rape Crisis Centre.

Overseas entries:

a)enter via website using a credit card

b)enter by sending a paypal payment to coordinator@galwayrcc.org

c)enter by post

Competition
winners are informed around late Febuary but the official announcement
is made at the time of the prizegiving – this year it will mid March
2014.Check the website after this date or send an SAE for the list of winners and judges’ reports.

Friday, 20 December 2013

Hope
to see loads of you in festive mood on Sunday 22nd December in Accents Cafe, Stephen's St Lower in Dublin. 7pm. http://www.uniquetodublin.ie/socialise/accents-coffee-tea-lounge/

I'll be wearing my Christmas jumper and waxing
lyrical. With the energetic and inimitable David Hynes

Show starts promptly at 7pm as we have an amazing array of talent on display. Come see our lyrical diva Kate Dempsey Our bantering bard Philip Lynch Leinster king John Moynes who will not only be charming you with his poetry but also his comedy. And coming from any bar or room which will have him the musical wit genius that is Mark Cox. We have Eoin O Murchu with funny words
And fresh from her world tour of England where the crowds of
littlehampton north gloustershire and worchesterpark were left screaming
for more we have the comic genius Aideen McQueen. As usual there's me David Hynes and also a late addition if there's time of Eddie izzard .

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

The window for 2014 Travel and Training Award applications opened on 27 November 2013. There are no formal deadlines for the Travel and Training Award. Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis. Applicants seeking support for formal courses (postgraduate or equivalent) and for other eligible opportunities must submit their application at least six weeks before their course or work programme begins. You are advised that the Arts Council cannot guarantee to assess applications received less than six weeks before a course or work programme begins.

Funding will be available in the following art forms: Architecture, Arts Participation, Circus, Dance, Literature, Music, Opera, Street Arts and Spectacle, Venues, Visual Arts, and Young People, Children and Education.

As I understand it, there isn't a deadline but when theannual money runs out, it's gone.

Do if anyone outside of Ireland is interested in a reading from me alone or with the Poetry Divas, let me know.

Please visit the Arts Council website here for further information: here.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

The Prole Laureate CompetitionPrize
Winner: £140, Publication in Prole 13 in April 2014
Publication on the Prole website
2 x runner up prizes of £30, possible publication in Prole 13
Publication on the Prole website

Judge
Kate Noakes
Kate Noakes is an elected member of the Welsh Academi. She has taught creative writing for Oxford University. Her most recent collection is Cape Town from Eyewear Publishing (2012). I-spy and Shanty is forthcoming in 2014 from corrupt press. Her poem ‘Snow light’ was selected by Carol Ann Duffy for her Poetry Corner in The Daily Mirror in January 2010. She won the Owen Barfield Poetry Prize in 2009.
Entries will be anonymised before being sent to judge.

Deadline:Feb 1st 2014
Winners will be announced in issue 13 of Prole in April and on our website by April 20th.

Details
We are, as ever, completely open: free verse, blank verse, highly formed verse. We want poems that epitomise the editorial values of Prole: to make writing engaging, accessible, entertaining and challenging. Quality is all.
All work must be the original work of the writer and be unpublished.

Fees
£3.00 for first entry, £2.00 for any subsequent entries.

How to enter

Via our website and email – preferred.
http://www.prolebooks.co.uk/page6.html
Make the correct payment using PayPal.
Email your entry, including the text and PayPal transaction number within the body of the email, to: poetrycompetition@prolebooks.co.uk
By post
Make a cheque (GBP only, please) payable to
P Robertson for the correct amount and mail along with entry to:
Brett Evans
Prolebooks
15 Maes-y-Dre
Abergele
LL22 7HW

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

The Arts Awards are intended to stimulate and support the ongoing development of the arts in County Cavan. This award scheme is intended to assist organisations and individuals in the development of new and innovative Art projects and events in County Cavan and support professional artists to develop. Cavan County Council strives to work with individuals and communities to promote access and participation in all art activities. Applicants must be from or residing in County Cavan at the date of application or planning work that is relevant to the County.Details of the various awards as well as the application form are available here.Perhaps some Cavan based festivals will have the readies to pay me to read now!

Saturday, 7 December 2013

Magma is a super poetry magazine based in the UK. Well worth picking up a copy.

Deadline: 12 December 2013

The competition has two contests:

Magma Judge’s Prize
For a poem of 13 to 80 lines. All poem entries of 13 to 80 lines
will be entered for the Judge’s Prize which this year will be judged by
award-winning poet Philip Gross. Philip Gross is Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Glamorgan. He won the 2009 T S Eliot Prize
with The Water Table (Bloodaxe) and the 2010 Wales Book of the Year award with I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon).
First Prize £1,000
Second Prize £300
Third Prize £150

Magma Editors’ Prize
This celebrates the short poem and is open to poems of up to 12
lines. The Magma Editors’ Prize reflects the magazine’s unique rotating
editorship and poems of up to 12 lines will be judged by a panel of
Magma Editors comprising Julia Bird, Rob Mackenzie, Ian McEwen, Laurie
Smith and Karen McCarthy Woolf. The panel will select a range of poems
for ‘special mentions’ as well as choosing first and second prize
winners.
First prize £1,000
Second Prize £300
Plus 10 Special Mentions £15 each

As part of the prize, all 15 winners will have their poems published
in our Spring Issue 2014 and be invited to read alongside Philip Gross
at Magma’s prize-giving event early next year.

Competition Entry Fees: £5 for the first poem, £4 for the second and £3
for the third and each subsequent poem. Magma magazine subscribers
benefit from reduced fees, £4 for the first poem, £3 for the second, and
£2 for the third and each subsequent poem.

Thursday, 5 December 2013

Neil Astley is the editor of the brilliant and highly regarded published Bloodaxe Books. My lovely Dad, John Prior (as seen in Poetry Bus 3, Rialto and others) went to a workshop he gave recently in Norwich and wrote up a report which he has kindly agreed to share with you here.

REPORT OF A TALK BY NEIL ASTLEY

THE EDITOR OF BLOODAXE BOOKS

GIVEN AT THE WRITERS CENTRE NORWICH

NOVEMBER 11th 2013

The twelve attendees at this meeting
had all been published: all with magazines, one had been mentored through the
Writers' Centre and one had been through the UEA poetry course.

Neil's talk was mainly concerned with
getting your first collection published but on the way he gave excellent advice
for poets right through the writing process. I shall follow this route in my
report, beginning with the poem itself through to full publication.

Before doing this it is worth pointing
out the there are large numbers of people writing poems. For example, the
recent National Poetry competition received 40,000 entries. Some were from
overseas of course, but generally it 's fair to say that huge numbers of people
are poets.

He went on to say that a survey showed
that books are bought by only 63% of the population. Only 1% of these
purchasers buy poetry and of this 1% only 5% of books are by living writers. Of
these living writers 67% of the books were by Seamus Heaney. It must be said
though that the figures not absolutely recent.This was in the year of Beowulf. Nevertheless it is obvious that the
market is small and the competition intense.

THE POEM ITSELF

The advice Neil gave
applies to all stages i.e. ….

95% of poems written
and entered for competitions are unsuitable.

Why?

1. They are not crafted i.e. it's prose
chopped into lines, and there's no metre or rhythmical
sense.

2. It's obvious the writer never reads
other poets and that their experience of poetry
comes from poorly remembered school lessons.

3. There are awkward rhymes with the inversion
of words.

And less serious but
still failings (though the judges might read the fault):

4. In the middle of a good poem there’s a 'wrong note': a line or word that
jars or is syntactically wrong
or grammatically wrong.

5. It's boring. It might be OK but it's
anodyne. This particularly applies to writers out of writing schools.

6. The poem sounds too much like an
existing writer.

HOW TO IMPROVE

He gave advice as to
how to improve and rid yourself of the above errors.

a. Read your stuff aloud

b. Workshop your poems with other poets
– the more skilled the better.

c. Go to groups and on courses e.g.
Arvon, Ty Newydd (Wales) and there are some
University courses.

d. Above all: read, think, and write.

Luckily, at the talk in Norwich, all
twelve people were already doing these things and many of the readers of this
report will have heard it all before.

THE COMPETITIONS

Neil has been a judge many times. He
admitted that after a long list has been drawn up the process is a bit of a
lottery. The judges don't always agree so that sometimes the winner is the poem
least disliked by all the judges.

In the smaller competitions the poems
may be filtered through less reliable readers.

The numbers of entries can be too
tiring for the judges. He suggested that more than one poem should be entered
because, although no names are on the pages, the numbers are in sequence so
that not all the poems by the same poet are likely slip through unnoticed. Also
two good ones carry more weight.

If it's a big competition you are up
against the best so you have to be the best.

The big competitions can result in the
next stage being offered e.g. pamphlet publication or full publication. Big
competitions include: The Arvon, The National, The Cardiff, the Cheltenham, the
Plough and Basil Bunting. You will need to check the Poetry Library website for
the current list. (www.poetrylibrary.org.uk)

It was reassuring to
learn that the major competitions are truly open.

PAMPHLETS

These are sometimes called Chapbooks
(an American term). These are small booklets sometimes sold at readings. They
contain a small number of poems. The number and the rules for your submission
vary but once again look at the relevant website for details. A number of
publishers take on Chapbooks including Mariscat, Doughnut, Hearing Eye, Flipped
Eye, Rack Press, Templar, Rialto, Cinnamon Press, Nine Arches, Flarestack,
Smiths/Doorstop, Lighthouse an IOTA. Some of these run competitions for
pamphlets. Check before sending.

The sort of poems that will attract
publication are:

1. Faultless poems.

2. Coherent poems e.g. in the same
voice and possibly with a unifying theme. Bloodaxe
is proud to publish and to have published many women poets and people from mixed and ethnic minorities.

THE MAIN PUBLISHERS

Faber, Picador, Carcanet (the c's are
hard), Bloodaxe. Not all of these take unsolicited MS.

Also note that submissions to Carcanet
are through Oxford Poets.

Chatto might be starting a poetry list.

The etiquette is to send full
submissions to only one publisher at a time, of 64 pages or roughly 50 poems.

OR you can send samples of 6 to 10 poems
to some or all of the publishers. e.g. simultaneous submissions.

There should be a strong covering
letter, not rambling, of course, but mentioning you existing publications and
including your email address and a stamped addressed envelope. If you're older
(and one or two of the participants were older) Neil suggested you shouldn't
mention your age because each publisher is looking for a long term investment.

Neil gets 5,000 MS in his slush pile in
a year. He reads them all but may take months to respond.

If you are taken on, the time from
acceptance to publication could be 14 months and your advance could be £500.

THE INTERNET

Here the situation is constantly
changing.

You can publish an e-book for an
e-reader. The best poems for an e-reader have short lines so that they look
good on the page. An iPad can make poems look more attractive and add sound.
The internet itself can act as self promotion e.g. through blogs or u-tube
readings.

Some magazines publish on the internet
only and these are read by poets other than those who submit.

SELF PUBLICATION

This has a bad name for itself but self
publication can work, provided that you don't pay a commercial firm to publish
and promote you.

Neil recommended Lulu which is an internet business supplying print on demand. They
give the publication an ISBN number, and print exactly the numbers you ask for.
You design the cover, arrange the internal layout etc. and transmit this as a
file to Lulu. The costs are
transparent on the website and when you receive your copies you are on your
own, though more copies can easily be printed. Established poets self-publish
and distribute and sell books like these at public readings.

Apologies if you are familiar with much
of this report but I'm certain that not one of the listeners on November 11th
knew it all. I certainly didn't.

One or two among the twelve, may have been
discouraged by the general gist of Neil's talk but personally I felt he gave us
a useful guide as to how, with time and dedication, one might become better.

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Maynooth Library opened first in 1983 and is having its 30th birthday this week. We are celebrating with a reading of some poems by me and also some stories and chat by the well known local writer, Martina Reilly.

Please come and join us for the evening this Thursday 5th December starting at 8pm, main street, Maynooth.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

To celebrate the opening of
the Central Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire in Autumn 2014 Dún
Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council invites applications from writers to create a
new piece of work that references Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and/or its inhabitants.
This may take the form of any genre including literature, popular fiction, short
stories, poetry, screen or script writing, children’s literature, young adult
literature, factual writing and journalism. To apply writers must live in, work
in, be originally from or have studied in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown.

It is
envisaged that a selection of writers will be commissioned to develop a piece of
new work from the entries received while other writers will be invited by direct
commission. All the commissioned work will be published in a pamphlet or
broadsheet available from the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Library Service and online
via the County Council website. The writers will also be required to give a
brief reading of their work (together with some of the other selected writers)
in the Central Library and Cultural Centre.

For more information please contact Carolyn Brown at cbrown@dlrcoco.ie or (01)
271 9532.